10 Big Changes Coming To WWE On Netflix
5. Format Changes
Fans have grown accustomed to seeing a wrestler tossed to the floor during a match and suddenly hearing Michael Cole (or now Joe Tessitore) rhetorically ask whether the injured superstar can recover before immediately following up that we’ll find out later… “as Raw rolls on!”
Throw to commercial.
Nowadays, some of those commercial
breaks involved a picture-in-picture aspect, allowing viewers to see the action
that continues while the show is paying the bills, but the mid-match commercial
is a phenomenon that has been around for decades.
Netflix operates differently, but it’s still expected that Raw will have commercials. Dave Meltzer of Wrestling Observer Newsletter noted recently that Netflix wants to add commercials to their programming, but “they can adjust differently than on regular television such as when and how long the breaks are and not have the show to the second when it comes to that.”
That means that perhaps we’ll see more commercial breaks, but only lasting for 30 seconds instead of two or three minutes at a time. It sounds like there will be wiggle room, which means fans will have to adjust to those change. But if it means that six-minute matches aren’t broken up by three minutes of commercials (which happened twice on Raw this week), that will be a welcome development.